In this episode we spotlight gut health, and all the normal, and more unusual, health issues connected to our digestive systems. We speak to clinical nutritionist and the author of The Gut Repair Plan, Sarah Di Lorenzo, plus Melbourne chef and founder of Made by Tobie, a home delivery meal service, Tobie Puttock.

About the episode – brought to you by Australian Seniors. 

Join James Valentine as he explores the incredible stories of Aussie characters, from the adventurous to the love-struck. Across 30 inspirational episodes, Life’s Booming explores life, health, love, travel, and everything in-between

Our bodies surprise us in ways we never thought possible as we age, so in series five of the Life’s Booming podcast – Is This Normal? – we’re settling in for honest chats with famous guests and noted experts about the ways our bodies behave as they age, discussing the issues and awkward questions you may be too embarrassed to ask yourself.

Sarah Di Lorenzo is a clinical nutritionist and author of four books, including her latest, The Gut Repair Plan. She is resident nutritionist for Sunrise and Weekend Sunrise, and is passionate about sharing information about a healthy diet and eating the right foods to help with sleep, stress, weight loss, immunity, and slowing down the ageing process. 

Chef Tobie Puttock began his career in Melbourne, before travelling and cooking around the world, including alongside good friend Jamie Oliver, who shared his passion for simply cooked food. His most recent focus is his own brand of frozen ready meals, Made by Tobie, with a focus on producing meals that aren’t harmful to us or the environment.

If you have any thoughts or questions and want to share your story to Life’s Booming, send us a voice note - lifesbooming@seniors.com.au.

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Produced by Medium Rare Content Agency, in conjunction with Ampel Sonic Experience Agency

Transcript:

James Valentine: Hello and welcome to Life's Booming Series 5 of this most excellent and award winning podcast. I'm James Valentine and in this series we're going to ask the question, is this normal? I mean, as we age, stuff happens to us. Our bodies change, things fall off, we get crook, stuff doesn't work as well as it used to.

There's nothing we can do about it, we're getting older, we're ageing. But which bits are normal? Which bits do we have no control over? Which bits can we do something about? That's the kind of questions that we're going to be asking in this series, Is This Normal? of Life's Booming. Now, of course, if you enjoy this series, leave us a review.

Tell all your families and friends about it. And we want to hear from you as well. You can contribute to this. If you've got questions about things in particular that you want to know, perhaps there's some particular wear and tear happening to you, let us know. We'd love to see if we can answer that question in the series.

We're going to look at things like menopause, gut health, mental health, lots of other burning questions. So, think about those areas and if there's something in there that's specific to you that you'd like us to cover, let us know.

On this episode, Getting to the guts of it, we spotlight gut health, the normal, and the more unusual health issues connected to our digestive systems. We speak to clinical nutritionist and the author of The Gut Repair Plan, Sarah Di Lorenzo, plus Melbourne chef and founder of Made by Tobie, a home delivery meal service, Tobie Puttock.

Sarah Di Lorenzo: Hi, thank you so much for having me. 

James Valentine: Why are you a nutritionist? I can't even say it!

Sarah Di Lorenzo: Nutritionist, a clinical nutritionist. Why? I started with my own gut health, really, was what drove me into becoming a clinical nutritionist. I just did really notice around the age of 15 that foods affected me differently.

I noticed it with white bread in particular, and I would go home and say to my dad, who's a psychiatrist, a doctor, and I'd just say, I don't feel well when I eat that food. And he goes, oh yeah, yeah, we all feel like that from bread. It's probably a Greek thing, whatever. You'll be fine. Don't worry. And so I watched my dad always living his life bloated, and I was like, yeah, yeah, it's not great. 

And then when I was in Italy when I was 18 for a few months, it was the most incredible experience that I clearly just couldn't enjoy, because I had gut issues, I had non-coeliac gluten insensitivity, self diagnosed. And then I ended up after that, when I came back at that young age, I was doing my science degree at Sydney Uni, I came back and I was like, I need to work on my gut because my quality of life is not great. And so it dominated my life and I just couldn't enjoy my life. And so that's what I started doing was working on my own gut and I'm 51. So that's like 30 years ago, more so 32 years ago, I started, I realised then, so I went through my own gut healing journey and have spent a lot of those younger years just looking at my own rest and retest, trying different foods, creating menus, creating diets, I just did it as a hobby and a passion. 

And then I went on to study nutritional medicine after that, when I realised that it was really my calling. I feel like I'm a healer. I do. I've healed myself and now I want to heal everyone else.

James Valentine: Now, let's go to chef Tobie. Hello Tobie. 

Tobie Puttock: Hello, how are you today? 

James Valentine: Thank you so much for joining us. It's fantastic to get some time with you. This is something that's close to you. You think about the gut a lot.

Tobie Puttock: My wife, when we first met, she was very controlled by her stomach issues. So obviously all tied in with the gut. She had food poisoning when she was younger so badly she was hospitalised for a few days – not from my cooking! I didn't know her at this stage, it was in the UK, and it really screwed her gut up. 

So I remember for the first about three or four years of our relationship, everything was dictated by that. And it was IBS basically. And I didn't really understand, I'd never met anyone with such an issue before. And, you know, we'd have dinner plans, we'd be all ready to go. And suddenly her stomach would start to feel uncomfortable and we'd have to cancel dinner. Our whole life revolved around the stomach issues and after being together a few years, I had the opportunity to write my first cookbook.

We were living in the UK at the time, we came back to Australia and I met an amazing person named Dr Sue Shepherd. She goes under a different surname these days, but she is kind of a guru in the gut health space and she spent some time with my wife and basically together we adjusted her diet and she solved her own issues. So she no longer has IBS.

James Valentine: That's great. And it's come on a lot, hasn't it? Our consciousness of the gut, eating for our gut biome, I would say it's a way of thinking about food that's come up about in the last decade or so.

Tobie Puttock: Yeah, 100 per cent. Being in food for my career and my whole life revolves around food, I see things jumping in and out of fashion and gut health has been a huge fashionable topic for a long time, and now it seems to have mellowed out into actual just fact. People accept that your gut is super important and eating the right foods and gut health really can make a huge difference to your life.

James Valentine: Yep. Well, let's plan a diet, a pantry for good gut health. What kind of dishes, what kind of ingredients do you focus on if you're thinking gut health? 

Tobie Puttock: Well, first of all, I try and eat as little processed foods as possible. So I also have quite an empty pantry at most times, but obviously fermented foods are fantastic, I do a lot of fermenting. After I jump off here, I will be going to make sauerkraut this morning, but things like kimchi, most fermented foods, are fantastic. And then there's going to be, if you do have things like IBS, there's going to be a lot of trigger foods that will be quite acidic as well. But yeah, definitely for me, we have a lot of sort of robust greens, lots of cavolo nero, Tuscan kale, brussels sprouts and all the good stuff there.

James Valentine: Right. I like that description of robust greens. These are the tough ones. 

Tobie Puttock: All the brassicas. So we're steering, you know, I think things like cos lettuce are fantastic and they're sexy and rocket lettuce and all that kind of stuff. But I remember a few years ago, it was probably 2013, I made a big life change, I just got spat out of kitchens, I was probably quite unhealthy without realising it, I was just going through life as a lot of people did and I was insanely stressed.

And I started doing a lot of yoga, and my wife, at the time, was seeing a personal trainer and trying to get shredded. And she was going to the personal trainer a couple of times a week, but coming home to eating my Italian food that I cook in restaurants, which I now wasn't cooking because I wasn't in restaurants.

And she gave me a list, this amazing list of all the things we can have as much as we want of, things we should never have, and things we can have in moderation. And we started cooking from that list. And I should also pop in there that we tried to conceive and it didn't happen naturally. And they tried to tell us – well, they did tell us – that IVF would be the only way.

And with a total diet overhaul cutting out all processed foods. And I don't want to say that kale saved our life or anything, but it kind of gave, you know, kind of did a little bit. I lost probably six kilos of body fat, my wife lost 10, and she wasn't big to begin with. We conceived naturally, and we kind of look at those as some of the fondest years of our life.

And then we had a kid and started eating junk food, and did the reverse of that because we were young parents – or new parents, I should say. Yeah. 

James Valentine: Yeah. All hail kale, I say. So Sarah, what happens to our gut as we age? What are the sort of things we need to be aware of as we're 50, 60, 70? What's happening?

Sarah Di Lorenzo: A lot's happening. I mean, I kind of noticed this when I thought, even myself, like it ages. It's as simple as our gut does age. We don't produce as much saliva as we used to. But if you think about eating, say a highly processed meal when you were young and be like, oh that was okay. Or even getting blind drunk when you were young.

And then you think, well, that was okay. You go and now in your 50s, you go and eat a big processed meal and you're like, oh gosh, you kind of really do feel it. Or you go out and have a big night on the drink. The next day people will notice it. 

James Valentine: The next two days. 

Sarah Di Lorenzo: People notice it. They really feel it. So look, it ages.

At the end of the day, when you really look at it, first of all, we don't, as I mentioned, there's just not as much saliva. People don't produce as much of the digestive enzymes, so like lactase, so people notice things like, oh I'll hear things in clinic, I just don't really seem to process dairy like I did when I was young.

Well, cause you're not producing enough digestive enzymes, so it comes that whole process ages as well, and there's just, even the way our peristalsis, the whole system is…

James Valentine: Is that swallowing?

Sarah Di Lorenzo: Yes, swallowing issues, chewing. People tend to change their diet as they're older. If they've got things like dentures or dental issues, it can start right from there.

So, the microbiome changes. The microbiome is the habitat which our microbiota live in. So I always explain that to people. 

James Valentine: This is all the bacteria in our gut. 

Sarah Di Lorenzo: Bacteria, fungi, viruses. 

James Valentine: This is the new thing. This is the newer discovery. This is not stuff we understood. You know, when you were first going, I don't feel so good. 

Sarah Di Lorenzo: Correct. Yeah, this is all new stuff and it is fabulous. When I was actually reading all this stuff and I was putting this book together, I'm just in awe of our gut. Like, I'm so impressed by it. I really am. The residents that live there, that I might point out, our gut bacteria, weigh two kilos. Yeah. Yeah. 

James Valentine: Isn't that amazing? Two kilos of biomass of living stuff. 

Sarah Di Lorenzo: I find that fascinating. 

James Valentine: So like, do they change if we don't look after them? 

Sarah Di Lorenzo: Correct. 

James Valentine: Or do we need to do stuff? Are we trying to keep a youthful gut or do we need to understand our maturing gut?

Sarah Di Lorenzo: Well, there is that, but look, we do need to take care of it. And this is one thing that I see as people age what they don't do is they don't create that diversity. So our gut bacteria love, love, love a diversity in our diet. So as we age, we tend to eat the same things every day. People have the same breakfast every day, the same lunch, the same dinner. They don't eat a lot. 

Now, it's actually, and that's one of the biggest problems. So as you age, it's really important to make sure that you've got that diversity to feed that good bacteria in our gut. We want those colonies broad. We want to feed, because all the different bacteria do different things. Like we've got a bacteria, which is my favourite one, called akkermansia muciniphila.

James Valentine: But that's easy for you to say. Say that again. It's a what? 

Sarah Di Lorenzo: Akkermansia. It's my favourite bacteria. I love this bacteria. We want lots of it, so akkermansia muciniphila is one that keeps us at a healthy weight. And then you've got like bifidobacterium, which actually helps break down the food we eat.

I know you're looking at, if anyone could see James right now!

James Valentine: No, it's impressive. Okay, very, very good. It's like when people see birds and they use the Latin name. It's like, very good. Well done. 

Sarah Di Lorenzo: Now I've lost my train of thought. Yeah, sorry. Okay, as we age…

James Valentine: Yeah, as we age. I think what I'm interested in is, like, with a lot of things we want to stay, we need to stay, youthful. Is our gut like that, or should we be allowing our gut to mature?

Sarah Di Lorenzo: I would want to be keeping my gut as young as possible. Definitely. The other thing we forget is medications that people take as they age. So medications can really impact gut health. And we know that.

People often take laxatives when they're older. There is actually this recent study that came out that showed that people who use laxatives – not stool-bulking laxatives, but actual laxatives – have a 51% increase in their risk of dementia, which shows that gut brain axis. So there's a lot of things that can, stress is a really big one. It can be stress with ageing, stress for whatever, that will impact gut health. But it is creating that diversity and we only eat I think, 75% of the adult population only eat from 12 different plant types over the course of the week.

That's some research that I have seen. So one great thing that you can do to start to improve and feed all those different colonies down there, like akkermansia, and grow more of them, the one thing you can do is make sure, a little test you can do, is make sure you're eating 30 different plant species over the course of the week.

James Valentine: And Tobie, how do you approach getting that diversity in the diet? 

Tobie Puttock: Yeah, there's a lot to be said for it. General nutrition, I have a basic understanding of, but my main thing is making things taste good. Which is what I wanted to do with my book, The Chef Gets Healthy, which was about making everyday food. Because I think as a society, we tend to look for easy answers for big problems. 

And I remember at one stage, the fried southern chicken burgers were trendy. And then on the other end of the scale, you had Pete Evans pushing these really super hardcore diets like the paleo diets.

And I always think that the answers lie somewhere in the middle. You don't need to go to these extremes.

James Valentine:  Okay. Well, give us some insights into what you do with these sort of things. Cause I think sometimes people say, look, the fermented foods, kimchi, sauerkraut, they're good. And then you should be eating more of the brassicas, the broccoli and the sprouts and all that sort of stuff.

But if you're used to the steak and veg, if you're used to the pizza, you don't know what to do with this stuff.

Tobie Puttock:  Yeah, it's true. And I believe that you can still eat all that. You just need to add in vegetables. So I think as a society we're getting better at this, but until recently we've eaten way too much protein.

Aussies tend to eat beef or lamb, or similar sort, four to five nights a week and even more seven nights a week. I remember speaking to somebody saying, oh, you should have fish once or twice a week. And they had no idea. They never cooked fish. They had no idea of the health benefits of that as well.

But my belief is that we need to pull back on eating meat, substantially, for so many reasons, you know starting with environmental, but also our health as well. So I believe a great diet and a lot of research has been done on this and proven, the Lancet report has shone some great light on this, which is that we should probably eat a vegetarian diet three to four nights a week. Eating meat is expensive, so you can save that money that you're not spending by cutting meat out of the diet three to four nights a week.

And then when you do eat meat, eat a fantastic cut of meat that's sort of grass fed, comes from a reputable supplier, therefore we're not fuelling the inhumane farming trade. And you will notice huge differences. Now, simple ways to cook vegetables. I've worked in very technical kitchens and it's funny, because since I've been out of kitchens since 2012, I've often realised that cooking vegetables, the easiest way, is often the most flavoursome and nutrient-beneficent. 

So, I grew up with a British father who grew up in a family which was often, I think, frozen vegetables, or vegetables that were cooked until all the chlorophylls and colours had gone out and they were grey. I do the polar opposite of that. 

So, I'm not into a raw diet, but I think you need to cook vegetables until, for example, with kale. Let me talk you through one of my favourite quick dishes. So we do a breakfast, which is, baked eggs and kale, and fantastic. And my meat-eating friends who I've given this to just go bananas for it. 

So it starts in a pan with a little bit of olive oil, and garlic and chili – so aglio e olio base – and you sauté that off over a low-to-medium heat until the garlic starts to soften and become translucent, at which stage you break in some kale – and cavolo nero, which is a type of Tuscan kale, is also fantastic. Even more robust leaves than the traditional green kale that we're familiar with now, with those stems which are really fibrous. I normally leave those out and keep them for a juice or similar, but they've got a lot going on, our body needs them, but for this particular dish, not the best.

So break off the leaves, sauté them around, mix them through with the oil and the garlic and the chili until it just starts to green, at which stage you can crack a couple of eggs into there. And then normally over the top of that, I break some feta cheese into there, dabble a little bit of natural Greek yogurt, some hemp seeds, a little good pinch of sea salt and pepper, bung the whole thing into the oven just until the eggs are set. We're talking two, three minutes. 

So you can make this whole dish, if you're good, in under 10 minutes. And it's got a lot going on there. You're going to get all that beautiful fibrous veg from the kale in there. And the protein from the eggs, the hemp seeds are fantastic, and the whole thing just tastes amazing.

It's a delicious breakfast. But kale can be really, really easy to cook. I mean, it's as simple as sautéing it down for a couple of minutes. 

James Valentine: So Sarah, tell us more about feeding our gut bacteria. 

Sarah Di Lorenzo: So we want to feed these guys with prebiotics. So that's what they eat. Bacteria need these prebiotic-rich foods, which are the foods people just don't get enough of.  They might go and take probiotic supplements, but you need the pre's to feed the pro's. It's as simple as that. Prebiotic-rich foods, fibre, that we can't digest as humans, but the bacteria feast on them. And so we want all of those wonderful foods. Now things like asparagus, apples are great, onions, garlic, oats, and all great foods, sourdough is another good one.

All excellent foods that we should really be eating. Leek, Jerusalem artichoke, they're all coming to my mind now. You can see my mind is flowing in with them. I've unlocked that part of my brain, which is full of prebiotic information and let it flow out. Yeah. So we need to actually feed them to grow.

And in turn, their waste product, the bacteria waste, is what we as humans thrive on, it's critical for our overall health and wellness. And we call their waste, which is called a postbiotic, is actually a short-chain fatty acid, or it's called butyrate. So butyrate feeds our colon cells. It makes the wall of our gut strong and firm, which is what we want. We don't want it inflamed and leaky, where you get what's called leaky gut syndrome that leads into migraines and headaches. And so that's called post. I'm obsessed with butyrate. I just want so much butyrate. I would drink it. So you can see that’s how it all kind of works. 

James Valentine: Yeah. Yeah. And so we should be getting all this through foods, not through supplements, pills, little liquids, you know, things that are meant to sort of put it there. Just do it through the stuff that you eat?

Sarah Di Lorenzo: Correct. But if you were, for example, someone who was taking a course of antibiotics, because the antibiotics, whilst they're amazing and they save lives and they wipe out the bad, they also wipe out the good.

So if I was to have to go on a course about antibiotics, I would take probiotics, I would take them in supplement form, but I would also make sure I was feeding that, just having a bowl of oats for breakfast or having some asparagus, asparagus is a good one, or just throwing a lot of onion and garlic in my food, making up shots of different… just adding it in where you can.

James Valentine: This is so much when we start to hear, the Mediterranean diet, that it covers all of these things, doesn't it? You cook with onion and garlic, there's oil on stuff. You will have sort of an oats or, you know, muesli type thing for breakfast or a cookie that's like that. This is the stuff. 

Sarah Di Lorenzo: Correct. And also all the legumes you forget that are so high in fibre. I think Westerners just forget about legumes. And they are… 

James Valentine: This is your chickpea, your beans, all that sort of stuff. 

Sarah Di Lorenzo: Yes. Lentils and chickpeas and beans, and they dominate the Mediterranean diet and people shy away from them because when they eat them – and this is the whole problem with fibre. We don't eat enough fibre. That is a huge problem. Part of the ageing process is people just don't eat enough fibre. Because when you introduce fibre to people that aren't used to it, they get flatulent and distended. And they go, oh I've got FODMAPs or I've got this. And I'm like, no, no, no. You just had too much fibre, too quickly.

You have to introduce fibre slowly to people to get them over it. That's what I've written. The four-week plan of my book is just that slow introduction of fibre so people don't get those symptoms. 

But it is a common base of the Mediterranean diet and the gut bacteria, it’s all about feeding these guys, making them happy, making them grow, making all the good ones grow.

And in turn, supporting our health. It's pretty simple, but when you do the deep dive into it and look at all the different types of bacteria and as you can see, there's bacteria for mental health, bacteria for weight, bacteria for skin, bacteria for heart. And so we want lots of them, not just feeding one, which is why you can see that diversity is really important.

James Valentine: So I suppose I'm thinking that we had a long period of time where we worried about the heart. You know, there was a lot of focus on the heart. The heart's the thing. You have to deal with that. And then we've had a period of time where, look, it's weight. Weight is most important. You know, you've got to keep the weight off and make sure that you're at the right weight and that sort of stuff.

Is the gut just sort of the trend? Is it just the sort of the thing that everyone's talking about now? Because we're bored of talking about the heart or something like that. Is there more to it than that? 

Sarah Di Lorenzo: I think that when you think about trends and fashions in health, like, okay, well, cardiovascular disease, clearly it's a leading cause of death and disability.

So it's always going to be there. I do feel there are trends. I think trends are what you've got to be really careful of. Like at the end of the day, the heart's the centre, I mean, you have to take care of your heart health, and it still is that, it is the leading cause. And then weight is something that I feel it's evergreen. Look, at the end of the day, excess weight is inflammation, inflammation drives disease, it's just as simple as that.

Any patient that comes into my clinic, and sits down, and, oh hi Sarah, look, I'm here for my menopause, my gut, my cardiovascular, and I've seen them 15 to 20 [times], and I will say to them, okay, I'm not going to sit here as your practitioner, and just do a treatment protocol for your cardiovascular condition.  Because you're carrying 15 kilos of weight. 

So it all ties in together, so every single patient that sees me has to get to a healthy weight, because I know that it's so inflammatory. Adipose tissue is like this. It's big, it's proinflammatory cytokines, it is inflammation.

Inflammation drives disease. And number-one of the diseases is depression. Before you start going to cardiovascular, diabetes, thyroid, arthritis, or before you even go down that path, metabolic syndrome, it is the driver. And as far as gut goes, people who are overweight have poor gut health.

I'll tell you an exception to that though. So people who are overweight, talk to them about getting to a healthy weight and working on increasing that. The only exception would be, when I think, cause I'm right now, I'm just scanning all my patients that are currently in my clinic while I'm talking to you, is someone who would come in with H pylori [helicobacter pylori], and undiagnosed.

So I had a lady who brought her husband in. And this is quite a funny story. They're both 45, great couple, no kids, living their best lives. They don't want kids because they're fabulous and they want to just travel and enjoy. She can't cope with the amount of times he farts in a day. So she's just like, he farts way too much.

James Valentine: How many would be too much? 

Sarah Di Lorenzo: Well, I'm going to ask, I'm going to do a pop quiz on you James. Okay. How many farts do you think we should be doing a day as humans? 

James Valentine: I would go for around the dozen. 

Sarah Di Lorenzo: Not bad. Okay, 15 to 22, so yeah, you weren't far off. This guy was just farting all day. So I asked her that and she said it's constant. Like it's probably every five minutes. And she said it's actually ruining our marriage. I said, yeah, fair enough. And she can't sleep in the same room as this poor guy. So healthy weight, fit guy, Lebanese, so ate a lot of raw meat. I knew that there was something going on.

I knew he had a parasite of some kind. So I just sent him off for a test, came back, he had helicobacter pylori. And so we cleared up the H pylori, their marriage is back on track. 

James Valentine: And he's back to the 15 or 20 that we should all be doing…

Sarah Di Lorenzo: …instead of doing about a thousand. So that would be the exception.

And what I do see is people that come back in from travelling to places like Indonesia, who come back and they've had Bali Belly or different things, so they're the ones I also see, which again, where a parasite has impacted their gut, and it does ruin people's lives.  

James Valentine: Let's say I'm 70, I've never done any of this. Can I change? Is my gut going to change? Is it all too late? 

Sarah Di Lorenzo: It's never too late. I don't care, like actually, I had someone write to me this morning, because I did a post about how much I hate artificial sweeteners, and they said, is it too late? I've had my whole life living on Equal, and I drink Diet Coke every day, and I've got diabetes.

No, it's never too late. I will always say, I will never give up. I will fight for someone's health to the end. 

James Valentine: Tobie, for general gut health, if you're doing as you describe, you have two, three, four vegetable-based dishes a week, you're more conscious of eating some raw greens and that sort of stuff, you can have a pizza on Friday night? Yeah, you can have a glass of wine. It's not to say you've got to get rid of these things?

Tobie Puttock: No, it's about balance for me. It's like, I still have Cadbury chocolate in the fridge. I love that stuff, but it's about the majority of the time eating as well as you can. And of course we know we sort of started to get into the realm of biohacking now.

And we've got all these tech billionaires who will look you dead in the eye saying they're going to live to 150. And we've got, I forget the gentleman's name. He's reversing his age. He's a tech billionaire in Silicon Valley and he's now got the innards of about a 30-year-old and he's about 45 and he's going back about three years for every year.

So there's a lot to be said for that. Now we know that through processed diets, this shortens your life,100%. And we don't even have all the data yet, but a lot of the processed foods and I get really worried about these younger generations who can't cook, they're all into the cooking shows and they love watching it as eye candy, but they can't cook, which for me is such a basic life skill.

But if you look at all the oldest living people in the world without gut issues and all these kinds of things, they're eating very natural foods. They're in, you know, the Mediterranean, they're in Japan and they're eating just a lot of good produce. 

James Valentine: Yeah. Now, coming back to you, Sarah, what are your thoughts on this?

Sarah Di Lorenzo: So when I do gut repair work with people, the thing is, you get these people in, and I'll say, OK, so give me what are you eating today? I don't really know, I kind of, oh so you wing it, you ad lib the day. OK, so when I have an ad libber or someone who wings the day, all right, give me a 24-hour recall.

So that's my next question. Oh, yesterday, oh, I had a couple of pieces of toast. Ah, a bit of jam, I don't know, I just had that on the fly, grabbed a coffee. Had some Arrowroots at work or at home with the wife watching, you know, more breakfast television. Oh, I don't know what we had. Oh, we had leftovers for lunch, that's right.

Oh, my mum cooked, my wife cooked a spaghetti bolognese for the grandkids that came over in the afternoon. Oh, we had some bikkies or whatever. A bit of chocolate. They don't really know. And it's a lot of highly refined processed food, which is really dry, which really increases the production of insulin, which is driving disease, etc.

So when I say to them, right, do my gut repair plan for four weeks, I am taking them from what they think is okay as a Western diet. They might even be having a white bread sandwich for lunch or a stir fry for dinner. To me, that's a Western diet. So when you take someone from that and you say, right, do all your food prep, get everything organised, start your program.

And you put them on my program, which is a gluten-free program – number-one common allergen – first thing to go is headaches. And then you get that clarity of the thought instantly within three days you'll feel better. Energy, body systems working well, better sleep, better mood. And within three days, I'll get messages.

I see her on my day three of the gut repair. I've gone to the toilet twice today, three times today, I had a really good night's sleep. I feel my energy's really up in three days. So you can see, as I mentioned in the beginning of our chat, eating rubbish food and going out and hammering yourself on the booze, you get that input, like you picked two days. So you think two days of healthy eating. 

The gut does respond. So it will respond very quickly within three days. But to really overhaul it, I would say minimum three months. But it has to be lifelong.  

James Valentine: Yeah. What a great conversation. We've been into the stool. We've farted a bit together. We have. We've got the boy working. Yeah. I love it. We've covered so much good ground. And yet all of it is in an area that we've really only just started to think about. We should be thinking about all the time. It's sort of one of the most simple things we can do, isn't it?

Sarah Di Lorenzo: It's so basic. 

James Valentine: It’s really just, eat a lot of plants…

Sarah Di Lorenzo: …eat well, avoid processed food, 

James Valentine: …the stuff that comes in a package and it's processed, it's going to be bad for you. 

Sarah Di Lorenzo: Reassess your health, stay on top of it, diversity, plants, hydration, exercise, sleep well, stress management tools are really important for the gut brain axis, for the stress, taking care of your nervous system. It's never too late. It's never too late. 

James Valentine: It's never too late. Get on with it. Happy gut, happy life. 

Sarah Di Lorenzo: Absolutely. That's it. That's the foundation for everything. 

James Valentine: Thank you to Sarah and Tobie for your delectable advice. You've satisfied our hunger for knowledge of a healthier gut. You've been listening to Life's Booming, brought to you by Australian Seniors.